Our dining room table has a tablecloth. Under the tablecloth is a clear piece of plexiglas. Under that is a Cities & Knights of Catan board. No setup time needed! I played Settlers a few months ago, and it gets boring fast. Cities & Knights is far superior. Also beneath the plexiglas is a Backgammon board and a board for Mill (aka Nine Men's Morris).

Also, my group has biweekly ZPG (Zero Prep Game i.e., no traditional RPG) nights. A lot of the folks only bring new stuff, but some of us find our old favorites. The game I like to bring along in the hopes of getting a game together:

The newest one is a German card game called Die Sieben Segel (The Seventh Seal) that's a trick-taking game where you have to bid how many tricks you're going to take. Or sabotage the other players. Like Wizard but shorter.

Which reminds me, Wizard from US Game Systems is tremendous! Trick-taking with trump, 4 super-trump Wizards, and you only get points if you take exaclty as many tricks as you bid.

Many people are addicted to Reiner Knizia's sadly out-of-print Ivanhoe. It's about knights at a tourney and served as the inspiration for the With Great Power... conflict system.

Like Andy, we're fond of Zendo. Although my favorite Looney Labs game is Nanofictionary, the game of small stories.

In the same vein, few people will play Once Upon a Time with me, cause I'm quite good.

The boardgame Shark is a stock-trading game that's a great deal of fun and I suck at, yet will still play whenever able.

Good god, there's so very, very many on the shelves. My favorite from James Ernest is Witch Trial, because it allows for incredible parlor narration. But Diceland: DWS, Buttonmen, and the Dr. Luckys are quite worn out. And Bitin' Off Heads.

They love Are You A Werewolf? (aka Mafia, or Hitman) I suck at bluffing so I regularly moderate.

Other faves: [li]Abalone[/li][li]Pictionary[/li][li]Apples to Apples (which I think is fun, but my fiancée thinks is fun to an unreasonable degree)[/li][li]Quoridor is good, but frustrating your opponent is only fun for so long.[/li][li]I love Go but don't get much chance to play and get better.[/li][li]I get to play Pente a lot more.[/li][li]Pirates of the Spanish Main (et al.) is a fun game, though the "collectibility" thing is pretty offensive. The minis are excellent, the rules are at their core good and fun, but underdesigned. I've got an inordinate number of ships, but have pretty much lost interest in getting more.[/li]

Logged

the glyphpress's games are Shock: Social Science Fiction and Under the Bed.

Our at least once a month set includes:Puerto Rico, Ticket to Ride (& Europe), Ingenious*, Alhambra, Web of Power, Santiago*, Apples to Apples, For Sale, Fluxx. Time's Up has a lot of potential.* indicates new, so who knows if it'll have staying power?

Quote from: Joshua A.C. Newman

Apples to Apples (which I think is fun, but my fiancée thinks is fun to an unreasonable degree)

We burned out on Apples to Apples for a while for just this reason. Because kids and adults can play together and it's such a party game, we gamed the heck out of it with a few friends. Then we didn't touch it for months.

Settlers of Catan/ Cities and Knights is her favorite game. I think it's a little long, since who's going to win is often determined an hour before the game ends, but I still enjoy it. My favorite was Through the Desert-- now, I'm uncertain.

Trias is fiddly and fun. Ursuppe [Primordal Soup] seems slow but is often fun. I'd love to play some more Euphrates and Tigris, but we're not quite that heavy a gaming group. The same is true of White Lotus, which just hasn't gotten the play it deserves.

Card games. I like learning and playing new card games, like Schnapsen and 99.

I've become a recent convert to Ticket to Ride as well. We have a number of board games (like Plague and Ursuppe) and Cheap Ass games (Give me the Brain!) that are squirreled away. We really should drag them out more often.

Ah, Air-Racing; trying to recall the rules off the top of my head. They have been designed for participation games at conventions, and the like, so it's pretty "visual". It started off as Formula De with rulers & turn circles, but has now been reduced to this, pretty much:

Setup:You need:* A large board (9'-12' square)* Several 1/72nd scale WW2-era aircraft, with pontoons, painted up in racing colours. One per player.* 3-4 Turn Pylons, at a similar scale. Lay those out to make the 'track'* 2nd, 3rd, 4th gear turn circles (these are arcs of differing radii, with inch markings along the circumference)* A set of Formula De dice + 1d20 per plane to show Stress Points.

The correct route and number of laps is decided & agreed. All the planes start off with 15 (IIRC) Stress Points - indicated by the d20 - and in 1st gear. Have to get to speed 7 (top of 2nd Gear) to take off, and you cannot drop back into 1st (you will stall). Height is irrelevant -- all planes are considered to be skimming the ground, more-or-less.

Play: Play proceeds from the current leader to the plane at the back. The player then has to estimate (by eye) the orders and declare them; "12 inches forward, slide left 3 inch, with the rest on a left turn", etc. The appropriate gear die is then rolled and the route is determined using a ruler and the turn circles. You can slideslip up to 1/3rd of your forward movement, but that doesn't alter your heading. If you are going in a higher gear than the radius of your turn, you take one stress point per smaller radii you go for (thus doing a radius 4 turn in 6th costs 2 Stress Points). Dropping more than one gear at once also costs extra Stress Points. If you run out of Stress Points, your plane crashes (airframe breakage, pilot error, whatever).

If you misjudge a turn and cut a corner, you have to go back around that pylon before proceeding. Sometimes you will get shot at by ground AA guns (see below).

If you are touching (ish) another plane, roll d20s and check for matching numbers. The loser takes a Stress Point of damage. If you roll maximum in 5th or 6th gears, all planes will suffer a Stress Point of damage on a 1-2 on a d20. (This is all the same as Formula De, pretty much).

Guns: All planes have been given fixed-forward firing guns. These have infinite range and ammo and a 15 degree off-centerline arc. The attacker moves backwards 1" and rolls a d20. If the attacker fired on the same target last turn they hit on a 1-4, otherwise they hit on a 1-2. Hitting causes the target to lose a Stress Point. If the attacker rolls a 20, the guns jam and cannot be used for the rest of the race.

Landing: After crossing the finishing line, you have to land your plane safely to land and pick up your medal. Roll 1d20, add the number of Stress Points you have left and get 7 or more to land safely. Otherwise you crash and receive the medal posthumously.

There are a few other niceties, and as I said, it started off more complicated, but these seem to play well.

I play Go. I've been intrigued by it for over a decade, but only playing seriously for a little over a year. I'm currently 14 kyu.

I've also been acknowlegding the consimmer side of my nature of late (within reason). As others mentioned, Memoir '44 is awesome, especially with the Russian Front expansion (and Pacific comes later this year, woot!) but of late I've switched over to Command & Colors: Ancients, which is the same system, slightly elaborated, applied to ancients battles (Rome vs Carthage, with Greeks & Persians coming later this year). I've been getting into CDGs, specifically Wilderness War (French & Indian aka 7 Years War), Twilight Struggle (Cold War), and Hannibal: Rome v. Carthage ('nuff said). I recently got to play Friedrich, which is an amazingly awesome multi-player "eurowargame" covering the 7 Years War in Europe (everybody dogpile Prussia!). Zero!/Corsairs & Hellcats is to the air war in the Pacific what M '44 is to the land war in Europe (light, fast, but super thematic) and has been seeing some table time. And Attack Vector: Tactical has taken over the part of my brain that used to be dedicated to Star Fleet Battles.

On the non-consim front, I just picked up Havoc, by Sunriver Games, which is a really cool drafting & battling card game with light Hundred Years war theme. Highly recommend to anyone who likes card games. Dungeon Twister (Asmodee) is so cool, kind of a battling puzzle game with awesome dungeon combat theming, and almost no luck. Domaine is a fabulous "fighty" euro with a great tempo. And I just got turned on to (and won a copy of) Railroad Tycoon which is not only an amazing game to look at, but also to play.

my answers have to be mostly past tense, because as I've mentioned before, my deep dark secret is that I don't like most card, board or dice games. I used to play quite a few as a kid, but something about them turns me off. RPGs ruined me for other games.

Here's what I have played in the past. I'm mostly listing them to forestall anybody saying "oh, you just didn't play the right games! You should play X."

I'm mostly listing them to forestall anybody saying "oh, you just didn't play the right games..."

Well, um, you didn't, but that's okay, you dont' have to ;)

There *is* no right game, for me.

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Magic Realm (or was that Enchanted Realm?)

Did it involve log sheets and a rulebook that would choke a horse? Then it was Magic Realm. Otherwise it was something else! :)

I'm unclear about the size of the rulebook, and I'm not sure how many logsheets there were. It's the game with the hex tiles that you connect for your map, and that you turn over when a hex is enchanted.

Yeah, it's changed quite a bit, now. The freeform movement rules was the 1st big change, and then changing the tyre, bodywork, etc. tracks into one number simplified things and made shooting a more effective tactic. Somebody in front? They must have done some hard (stress-inducing) turns to get there, so a couple of lucky shots will take them out of the race!

Hmm. I play a lot of board games. I also play Shadowfist (the CCG about hong-kong action movies stories).

Off the top of my head (and brief perusal of the thread), Citadels, Money (Kniza), Ingenious (kniza), Tigris and Euphraties, Merchant of Venus (old, but fun), Power Grid, Puerto Rico, San Juan, Gua, New England, Acquire (one of the best games of all time!), Button Men (but admitedly mostly on the website), Pit, and Set (hard to stop playing...). Santiago's good too (and I want to play more Primordial Soup).

Recently, I've finally got around to learning Muterer and Caylus (ok, but of a diffential there) but I need to play them more.

There are, of course, a bunch of other games I'm at least lukewarm about but will play -- Diamont, Jungle Speed, Castle of Magic, and Settlers among them.

My gaming group is part of a larger circle that meets smi-regularly to play Diplomacy, Starfarers of Catan, and poker. That's pretty much all we play these days in the way of analog, although various among us have been eying certain German board games, so our horizons might soon be expanding. (Some of the other guys play a couple of wargames, and use used to play Brikwars, but I'm not so much into that stuff these days.)